This is a cool little way to extract a certain color from your image and change or subdue it. For example, as with the image below, there is a lot of green in there. And sometimes it can be hard to work with so much green, especially if green isn’t in your overall color scheme. So this picture, then:

No, you got the your menu and choose “Select >> Color Range.” A little dialogue box will appear. The Fuzziness bar is how you choose how much of the image you want to select. And at the bottom there is a drop down menu labeled “Selection Preview.” Choose whatever you want. It doesn’t really matter; they just give you a few different views in the preview box so you can see how much of the image you are selecting. Usually, I prefer Grayscale or Quick Mask.

So, now you can mess around with the Fuzziness and see how much you want to select. You don’t even have to choose “Sampled Colors” (from the top of the dialogue box.) You can choose one of the colors from the drop-down menu. But for this instance, I want to use Sampled Colors. I use the little eye-dropper tool and click on the green spot on the grass. But I also want to choose the greener areas in the tress in the background, so I clikc the little eyedropper tool with “+” next to it, which allows me to select multiple ares of the photo. Finally here are my options:

You can see I have the Fuzziness set very low. But this is because I used the eye-dropper tool to sample my colors.

Now I click OK. And you can see how much of the image has been selected.

The cool part comes now. You have several options. You can create a new adjustment layer or a fill layer, even a gradient or pattern layer! First I inverted the selection. (Right-click >> Select Inverse). For this example I have created anew adjustment layer using a gradient map. I have set the blend mode to “Color.” Check it out!

Pretty neat, huh? And because I used a new adjustment layer, I can brush/erase the mask and get an areas that the selection didn’t pick up or place it did that I didn’t want it to!

Just to give you an idea of more cool stuff, you can do, check it out when I add a pattern layer instead:

I hope this was neat trick for you to read about!